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Paul Ryan, Black Panther?

Did Paul Ryan quote a famous 1960s Black Panther Party slogan in his speech on Saturday announcing his candidacy for vice president on the Republican ticket?

For a moment, it sounded that way. Recalling words of advice offered by his late father, Mr. Ryan said, “I still remember a couple of things he would say that have really stuck with me. ‘Son, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.’ Regrettably, President Obama has become part of the problem, and Mitt Romney is the solution.”

Library of CongressEldridge Cleaver, 1968.

Give Mr. Ryan credit for making the Republicans’ big tent a little bigger. The slogan “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” served as a mantra of sorts for Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information for the Black Panthers, the extreme black nationalist group. Cleaver was an unlikely public figure who had emerged from the Los Angeles ghetto with a long criminal record and a penchant for provocative statements. An ex-con who had done time for a series of rapes, he called for armed resistance to government authorities and urged black G.I.s in Vietnam to kill their white officers. With Cleaver’s name attached, the phrase appeared on banners, buttons and picket signs at demonstrations well into the 1970s, and was picked up by other radical leftist leaders.

It’s perhaps unlikely that Mr. Ryan’s father, a lawyer in Janesville, Wisc., was present at a political gathering in 1968 when the Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, urging his followers to smash “the American Empire,” proclaimed:

Everyone falls into two categories. You are either part of the problem – or part of the solution. Being part of the solution means you’re willing to grab a shotgun and take to the barricades, killing if necessary. Being part of the problem means you’re on the other side of the shotgun. There is no in-between.

The Panthers, it turns out, may themselves have been borrowing from an earlier, more mainstream usage of the phrase, in a 1967 poster campaign created by an advertising firm in Washington. The ads promoted Volunteers in Service to America, commonly known as VISTA, the anti-poverty service program begun as one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Mr. Ryan, who has built his career on opposing federal aid to low-income Americans, would hardly find this much more palatable.

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Charlie Rosner, the graphic designer and copywriter who wrote the text for the VISTA posters and claims credit for coining the famous slogan, recalled yesterday in a phone interview that the campaign was a rush job in response to an offer of free ad space on the sides of Washington’s mail trucks. The promotion included several different catchphrases; Mr. Rosner’s own favorite was “Not exactly the sort of work your mother had in mind for you.”

But Mr. Rosner, a registered Democrat who describes himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative,” has no plans to try to collect usage fees from Mr. Ryan, or from anyone else. “Certain pieces of the lingo sort of become the property of nobody,” he said. “This one seems to have the half life of Strontium-90. It’s terrific that he’s using it; it’s a pretty decent set of words to live by.”

Some might also see Mr. Ryan’s usage of the phrase as an example of how today’s conservative leaders have adopted many of the attitudes and tactics of what was once the new left. Just as the gentler liberalism of the early 1960s hardened into the militancy of the Black Panthers, so, too, Republicans like Mr. Ryan have increasingly adopted a “you’re either with us or against us” stance.

Mitt Romney and his new running mate might find comfort in another odd twist of history. Eldridge Cleaver eventually fled the United States after a shootout in which two policemen were wounded. But he later returned, having pleaded guilty to lesser charges – and, before his death in 1998, became a Republican and a Mormon.

Adam Goodheart is the director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, where Peter Manseau is a scholar in residence and Ted Widmer, a former presidential speechwriter, was the founding director. Kathy Thornton and Katie Tabeling, student associates at the center, contributed research.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.